Because
I was a working musician from around high-school onwards, and more seriously
during the 1980s, spent quite a bit of time in recording studios. In the studios
I noticed many different makes and models of monitor speakers, and a large
percentage of them were made by JBL. I saw and heard in live venues JBL monitors
on stage, since this was the era before those on stage were able to wear
personal in-ear headphone monitors. When I left that world at the end of the
1980s and began to assemble an audio system for my home, I wanted to purchase a
pair of JBL studio monitors.

This made perfect sense to me. I wanted to hear
music in my home that sounded as close as possible to what the musicians and
engineers heard it when they were making it. I considered
other brands and models, and even came close to purchasing a used pair of Urei
813 monitors, since many of very larger studios I visited used them. But these
dual woofer, horn loaded time-aligned speakers were too large. Even though my
girlfriend was accustomed to me cramming our one bedroom apartment with music
gear and LPs, I didn't think it would be fair to subject her to these very
large, industrial designed speakers. They were also quite expensive.

What I really wanted was a pair of JBLs. And so, after
auditioning models I ended up acquiring from an industry insider a brand-new pair of JBL's new L7 tower speakers, which were at the top of their new home speaker line.
These beasts weighed in at almost 80 pounds each and stood nearly
four-feet high. Even though it was obvious that they were meant for a larger
space, I rationalized that they had a relatively small footprint at 1.5" foot
deep and about 0.75" of a foot wide. The space savings was mostly due to it
having a side-firing 8" woofer, with its 5" mid and 1" titanium dome-tweeter
mounted at the top of its cabinet. Alas, these were the last JBL speakers I ever
owned, in the early 1990s I switched to a pair of similarly sized pair of Snell
towers, which was about the same time I started my high-end audio equipment
reviewing career.

Introduced in 1970, the JBL L100 was the most popular
loudspeaker in JBL's history. The JBL L100 Classic introduced last year,
according to JBL's literature, "is not a "retro speaker, but a modern speaker
built to modern specifications", although it is a "modern take on the
time-honored legend". It has "vintage styling", including a "retro-inspired"
design, and "iconic" Quadrex foam grille that is available in black, burnt
orange, or dark blue, with "newly developed acoustic technology and design". JBL
got the idea to introduce the L100 because some of the engineers at JBL were
taking home their 4310 studio monitor and using it for home use. They then
modified the cosmetics of that speaker for home use, creating the original L100.

The New JBL L100 ClassicThe newer version of this speaker has many design improvements
over the older model. It has a newly designed crossover network, it uses
internal "V-Brace", which is normally used in more expensive models, and the
speaker uses new drivers, which includes its newly designed titanium tweeter.
The JT025TI1-4 1" titanium dome tweeter is mated to an acoustic lens for optimum
integration with its 105H-1 polymer-coated 5.25" pure-pulp cone midrange driver
directly below it. In their literature, JBL says its "powerful" bass comes from
its 12" cast-frame, JW300PW-8 white pure-pulp cone woofer in a bass-reflex
enclosure, via a single front-firing port tube. The high-frequency and
mid-frequency L-pad attenuators on the front baffle preserve the classic
features of this "iconic legend".

The cabinet has a "genuine" satin walnut wood veneer enclosure
with black painted front and rear panels. Many music lovers of a certain age
will recognize this speaker from its grille, which is almost identical looking
to the older design, but the new model's grille is made from more modern,
sonically transparent materials. On its front panel the speaker has two
attenuators, one for midrange and one for high frequencies, its rear panel has
gold-plated five-way speaker binding posts.

UnpackingI had fun unpacking and setting up the JBL L100 Classic,
perhaps this was because I was so looking forward to hearing these speakers. The
L100 Classic arrived with optional black metal floor-stands that raise the front
of the speakers 8" off the floor in the front, tilting the speaker back at a
5-degree angle, this way they will be aimed at the listener seated at an average
distance away from the front of the cabinets. The stands have rubber spikes that
were perfect for my hardwood floor, but the rubber spikes are also designed so
that they can penetrate the carpet of one's listening room.

I connected the speakers to the power amps in my second system
that is in a common space of our home. This system is more in line with what the
average user of these speakers would likely be, located in a room that is more
in line with where the speakers will end up, such as a living room or a rec
room. I could have set them up to near state-of-the-art gear in my main system,
which is located in an acoustically treated listening room. But this secondary
system was more appropriate, but still had some very nice equipment that allowed
me to hear the full sonic potential of the JBL L100 Classic speakers.

The review system included a pair of tubed PrimaLuna DiaLogue
6 monoblocks, but more often I used a pair of Auralic Merak monoblock
solid-state amplifiers. The preamplifier for much of the review was a Nagra
Classic Preamp which was also powered by vacuum tubes. I used a variety of
digital sources, most often I used an OPPO BDP-83 Special Edition universal disc
player, and a now-discontinued Logitech Squeezebox network player which enabled
me to listen to selections that were stored on network accessible hard-drives
that were connected to my music server in my main listening room.

Both of these
digital sources had their digital outputs connected to the coax inputs of a
Benchmark Media DAC3 HGC digital-to-analog-converter (DAC), which sometimes
doubled as a preamplifier since it has a remote-controlled motorized volume on
its front panel. The JBLs were connected using Cardas speaker cable, with
interconnects and digital cable made by MIT Cable and DH Labs.

Listening To JBL's L100 ClassicEven before these speakers were fully broken-in, I was very
impressed by their sound quality. They took a while to break in, most likely
because of their 12" woofers. I suppose I was expecting these speakers to be
tilted towards the low-frequencies – I couldn't help thinking that they looked
like speakers that would be on the floor of a shag-carpeted bedroom connected to
a quadrophonic Sansui receiver pumping out Grand Funk Railroad. Thankfully,
these JBL speakers sounded nothing like that. They sounded like excellent
high-end speakers, which included characteristics of what I would expect from a
pair of excellent sounding, full-range high-end speakers. What I like most about
hearing music through studio monitors is their detailed midrange.

JBL's L100 Classic clearly has this trait, as I could hear
into the mix of a track, which includes all the details of, for example, a
multi-track recording that makes up the finished track of a rock recording. The
midrange of these JBL's is extremely transparent, on certain recordings I felt
as if I was hearing a direct connection to the source. The titanium dome tweeter
of the L100 Classic is a top performer, as it also reproduced the music it was
fed in a very transparent manner. I loved hearing a drummer through these
speakers, tapping out the beat on a ride cymbal, the sound of the stick hitting
the surface of the cymbal with a natural ping and then hearing the decay fade
into the background.

The L100 Classic had a way of reproducing rock music better
than many other speakers in its price range that I can remember, in that it was
able to separate instruments such as electric guitar solos and lead vocals from
the rest of the mix. I became nostalgic for my late nights in the studio mixing
down tracks; the L100 Classic has the same way of being able to allow me to hear
things deep in a mix that other speakers would sonically gloss over. The
soundstage and imaging of the L100 Classic was top-notch, as they projected a
wide and deep soundstage behind and to the sides of the speakers. Some of the
images were projected a bit in front of the speakers, but thankfully they didn't
sound at all forward, as many monitor speakers I've used do, especially when I've
tried to use them as home speakers. The L100 Classics didn't "disappear" into
its soundstage, but as I said, the sounds were not stuck to the grilles of the
speakers, either.

I used the JBL speakers with its grilles on and off, and I
thought that the sound of the speakers sounded a bit better with the grilles
off. But I also preferred them this way because I thought they looked
better with no grilles, the classic (sorry) appearance of their white 12"
woofer, and the familiar three-way ported speaker with the controls for
attenuating the mids and highs on their baffles. In their advertisements, JBL
touts the classic look of the grilles of the L100 Classic, but I don't remember
ever seeing the older models of these speakers with their grilles in place, as
users were much more likely to use them grille-less. Don't get me wrong, I also
liked how the speakers looked with their grilles in place, but unless the room
was being cleaned, I left them off for during the audition period.

As I alluded to before, those who wish to rock-out will find
these speakers a dream come true. I was unable to find the limits of L100
Classic's volume, even when cranking the very powerful Auralic Merak monoblock
amplifiers. I played a recently remastered version of The Jimi Hendrix
Experience Axis Bold Of Love, the volume set to about the level that a
teenager would set it when left alone in the house for the evening. Noel Redding's
bass guitar on "Little Wing" not only shook the window frames of the listening
room but I could feel the low frequencies shaking my listening seat and my body.
The reason for this might have been an excess of mid-bass energy of the bass
guitar, but that wasn't the L100 Classic's bass veering from neutrality, but
that's the way it was recorded. Regardless of where these frequencies came from,
it added to the visceral experience of listening to music at an "appropriate"
volume, not detracted from it. The published specifications of the L100 Classic
state that the low-frequency response reaches to 40 Hz. I was surprised when I
read this spec after listening to the speakers for a while. I would have
expected this number to be lower.

Even though the lowest note a bass guitar produces is just
above these JBL's low frequency specification, we all know that low-end
fundamentals and resonant frequencies that are present in just about any music
that we play through our systems is much lower than that, and if we are going to
consider a speaker to be "full-range" we might expect the main speakers in our
systems to go this deep. Still, I thought that when playing just about any type
of music the JBL L100 Classic had sufficient bass, at least it went low enough,
and more importantly, had enough positive qualities that I really didn't think I
was missing much. The JBL L100 Classic's bass was tight, pitch specific, and was
flat down to a very low frequency, and therefore I think most listeners will
think that its bass sounds great, as did I. It has a 12" woofer, after all. I
did connect an SVS model SB-2000 subwoofer for the second half of the review
period, which claims to reach down to 19Hz (plus or minus 3dB). I was able to
set the sub's crossover to a very low frequency and its level also very low.
This replaced the speaker's "missing" frequencies, but it didn't sound as if the
sub was being activated very much at all. I do not think that a subwoofer
is mandatory when using the L100 Classic, although some might want to use one,
especially if these speakers are going to be used as the main speakers in a home
theater setup.

There was one quality that the JBL L100 Classics possessed
that surprised me. They were not only able to separate instruments within a
crowded soundfield, but they also was able to place dynamic distance between
instruments, groups of instruments, and vocals. Instruments and vocals that were
playing at the same volume and occupying the same space in the soundstage stood
out from this crowded field of instruments and vocals more than the others. I've
heard some studio monitors that were able to sort out the sound like this, but
after a while the monitor's sound would become fatiguing. The JBL L100 Classics
were very non-fatiguing, the upper midrange and treble of the JBL L100 Classics
sounded like music. If the music was annoying, I'd get annoyed. It was
never the fault of any frequency anomalies coming from these speakers.

I listened to many different recordings of different genres
while the JBLs were in my system. Yet I kept coming back to rock and electronic
music. I often I play Kraftwerk's The Mix when auditioning gear in my
system, especially when testing out speakers. The frequency response on
this recording is not only quite extended, but I like it because I'm so very
familiar with this album, so much so that it seems as if I've been playing it
constantly since it was released in 1991. But just for fun, this time I played
Board Of Canada's Music Has The Right To Children, which they released in
1998, at the height of that decade's electronica movement. Like most electronic
outfits BOC doesn't list the equipment they use, but I've read some interviews
where they reveal most of it, and when listening to the album it was fun to try
to detect which instrument was which.

The L100 Classics had no trouble sorting everything out on
this album, letting me hear all that was there, but also was able to present
everything as a whole, letting me bask in their "intelligent dance music", as
some call it, sounding akin to them reimagining Brian Eno's 1970s ambient albums
as Led Zeppelin reimagined the blues. Instead of soothing bass frequencies
floating below the music, these bass frequencies were treated and retreated, the
lowest of these frequencies shaking my gut. The soundstage that the L100
Classics produced while playing this album was filled with recorded voices and
what sounded like extraterrestrial birds, filling the front side of the room
with futuristic instrumentation.

I realize that it might be a little cliché, but I played the
title track Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. I must have played this
track thousands of times on my various systems throughout my lifetime. Not only
is it a great album, but a great auditioning tool. Not only in the introduction
to the song, where one can hear the musician shifting in his seat getting ready
to play the acoustic guitar, but it is a great recording of a guitar made at
Abbey Road Studios. The JBLs reproduced this as well as any dynamic speaker that
has ever been in this system, outdoing most of them that were priced anywhere
near the JBL L100 Classic.

I played the Acoustic Sounds issued SACD through the
OPPO player, and it was a great way to hear a the slightly idiosyncratic nature
of this speaker. I didn't measure the distance, but the drivers of the L100
Classic seem to be a bit farther away from my listening seat than usual because
this speaker is in on the floor of my listening room, titled up to aim the
drivers at my ears. This caused me to move my listening seat a bit closer to the
plane of the front of the speakers than other speakers that have been in my
listening room of late. Was this detrimental to the speaker's sound?

Absolutely not, but I think it did change the location of the
center of the soundstage a bit. This subjective observation wasn't one that I
viewed as a negative; it was just a little different than I was accustomed to.
But getting back to the Pink Floyd, I was taken aback at how well these JBLs
performed while playing back this SACD. The sound of the acoustic guitar on the
title track sounded fabulous, as did the rest the instruments and voices on this
album, I felt as if these speakers were acting as a sonic time machine, bringing
me back to Abbey Road Studios to hear them lay down this tour de force to tape.
The vocals sounded first rate, detailed yet lifelike, natural sounding, but at
the same time I the slight tape hiss led me to picture a reel on a tape machine
more than a human being seated in front of a microphone.

I then put on an SACD of Todd Rundgren's A Wizard A True
Star that was made available last year. The LP of this album originally
released as a single in 1973 suffered from length, over thirty minutes on each
side of this dense multi-tracked recording. This record was and is good enough
to transcend the poor sound that resulted from its length, but when the CD was
released it was a revelation. This was a great sounding album, yet I never was
able to hear this. Even better was a few years ago when it was reissued on a
two-LP set, and now I can enjoy the SACD, which allows one to hear the genius of
Todd Rundgren's music in even better fidelity. Hearing the SACD through the JBL
L100 Classics was fantastic.

There are some tracks that suffer from some overload
distortion, perhaps caused by Todd surpassing the 16 track limit, but the
overall fidelity is the best I've ever heard. And through the L100s Classics I
felt as if I was a fly on the wall in Todd's studio. Many of the songs are
recorded well enough where I could hear the individual tracks that made the
multitrack tape, the ambience being different on each of the separate tracks on
the tape. His vocals were especially fine, such as on the track "Zen Archer",
where I could imagine him inside a vocal booth, or perhaps he wasn't in a booth,
but it was very captivating. I neglected some other duties because I sat
listening to this hour-long album in one sitting.

RemindedWhen listening to the JBL L100 Classic, I was reminded of days
spent listening to not only the JBL monitors in the studio, but the JBL home
speakers in some friend's homes. I'm not about to claim that my aural memory can
recall specifics of the time spent with those older speakers. But I'd bet the
farm that the new L100 Classic sound much, much better. The L100 Classics are
modern speakers with a classic look, and what makes them modern is their
high-end sound. I think it's a bit odd that JBL calls the new L100 Classics a "bookshelf"
speakers.

Although it makes no sense to me, perhaps it is because they
are rectangular shaped, rather than tall and thin as many speakers that are
classified as "tower" speakers. Or maybe it is because back in the day many did
place these speakers on bookshelves. Who knows? Their classification of these
JBLs as a bookshelf speaker is the only statement that JBL makes in the
literature that I disagree with. Otherwise, they are spot on. These are truly a
classic looking speaker with a truly modern sound. The only thing I can think of
that might stop some from purchasing these speakers as soon as they realize that
they are available is their price.

Many non-audiophiles will balk, but any audiophile with even
just a bit of experience will recognize that these speakers are well worth their
asking price. In fact, when inflation is considered the cost of these speakers
are just about equal to what they cost back in the day. Still, I have no doubt
that many customers will purchase the JBL L100 Classic sight unseen. Not only
does JBL's reputation precede them, but these speakers will bring back pleasant
memories to many music lovers of a certain age. And to them, I say, go for it.
These speakers are a great way to enjoy the music.